What Is The Cooperative On 'AHS: Apocalypse'? Here's What Fans Should Know

The new season of American Horror Story has finally begun, but the premiere episode actually left us asking more questions than it answered. After kicking things off with a nuclear apocalypse, the show really got going when a handful of survivors were sent to live in a mysterious underground bunker. Apparently, this safehouse (along with an unknown amount of others) came to be because of a prescient group known only as The Cooperative. Of course, the big question everyone is asking now is, what is The Cooperative on AHS: Apocalypse? The shady organization is still a big question mark for us, but the premiere did drop some pretty important clues that might even suggest The Cooperative is connected to a certain past season of the show.

Spoiler alert: This post is going to go over some details from the first episode of American Horror Story: Apocalypse, so don't read on if you have not yet seen it. Before we dive into theories, let's go over everything that we know about The Cooperative so far. The closest connection we have to the group at first is Sarah Paulson's strict authoritarian character Wilhemina Venable, who lords over the residents of Outpost Three and informs them that she should be considered the face of The Cooperative to them. Venable also drops our only real detail about The Cooperative, describing the group as "a collection of the dozen greatest minds mankind has to offer." She also reveals that The Cooperative knew about the apocalypse before it happened and set up these outposts as a way to house survivors.

At the end of the episode, we actually meet one of the members of The Cooperative — none other than Michael Langdon, the antichrist baby from AHS: Murder House. But Langdon is not a baby anymore; he tells Venable that most of the other outposts had failed, but he could save anyone he chose from Outpost Three to come with him to a hyper-secure and better equipped outpost, presumably joining the rest of The Cooperative.

FX

From all of this, we know that The Cooperative is made up of about 12 people, and that Michael Langdon is one of them. And there is another very interesting little detail that Wilhemina Venable dropped that might connect The Cooperative to a Coven character as well. When welcoming people into Outpost Three, Venable revealed that the structure used to be an exclusive school for boys. Since this season is a crossover between Murder House and Coven, diehard fans' antennas went up, since Coven centered on a similar-looking exclusive school of witchcraft for girls.

Could Outpost Three have been a school for male witches before the apocalypse? And if so, then might our current reigning Supreme Cordelia Goode be another member of The Cooperative? After all, we already know how The Cooperative is linked to Murder House thanks to Michael Langdon, but we still need someone to link the group to Coven to complete the crossover. And Cordelia's mastery of clairvoyance seems to perfectly fit in with Venable's description of The Cooperative's ability to predict the apocalypse was coming.

We are sure to find out much more about The Cooperative as American Horror Story: Apocalypse continues to air at 10 p.m. ET, Wednesday nights on FX.